


Eyes Up (We're Flying)

by OnceABlueMoon



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Altean Colony (Voltron), Fix-It, M/M, Romance, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, Voltron: Legendary Defender Season/Series 08 Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-09-19 10:29:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20329645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OnceABlueMoon/pseuds/OnceABlueMoon
Summary: Keith and Shiro travel back in time to save Allura. Along the way, something blooms."There are things in this life, this universe, that you cannot predict, no matter how hard you try. Some things you simply cannot imagine until they happen before your eyes. Keith, to Shiro, was one of these things."





	Eyes Up (We're Flying)

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own Voltron Legendary Defender

They’re standing in front of Allura’s grave, the grand monument erected in her honour. Juniberry flowers sway in the wind, the grass rustling, the city behind them. The Altean sky is blue, blue, blue. Their hearts know only grey. 

Underneath her statue lies the tomb, but it is empty. Her body- or well, the atoms torn apart by the impact of existence itself reforming- most likely rest somewhere among the stars. Their heads are hanging. Shiro is quiet, too quiet. Lance is wearing a suit for once- Keith’s seen him in his godawful overalls, a _ farmer _when his dreams were the stars, like they’d just died along with Allura. Pidge and Hunk, with so much less wonder in their eyes these days. They all threw themselves into work to stop thinking about her. They all became less for it. 

Keith looks at his team and thinks: No. 

Because this team is his family, and if they’re not happy, he’ll find a goddamn way to make them, and Allura was _ part of them. _If it takes resurrecting her from the dead, then he knows what goal he’s gunning for. 

‘’So,’’ he says, impulsively as always, ‘’Who wants to build a time machine?’’ 

* * *

Hunk and Pidge lay it out for them. 

‘’It’s not a way to another reality,’’ is the first thing Hunk states. 

‘’Good,’’ Shiro staples his fingers against each other, ‘’Down that way lies madness. Honerva demonstrated that, if nothing else.’’

Pidge grins. ‘’This miracle we’ve built rides the ocean of time of this reality alone, and it can carry two people across the waves of the time stream.’’ 

Shiro’s going. Everyone knows that- he’s their best, he’s their brightest, and will keep a level head even in his desperation. He’s got PTSD, and maybe that’d would have been a mark against him years ago, but they’ve all fought in war by this point. All of them are hit by flashbacks from time to time, so Shiro’s not the odd one out. 

It’s the second person that creates discord. 

‘’I propose Lance,’’ Keith says. His reasons are not stated, but everyone can feel them hanging in the air, like the sword of Damocles above the King’s head. Or Lance’s head, in this case. Lance, who gave up the _ stars _in his grief. Lance, who fought until the end. Lance, whose heart still had an enormous Allura-shaped hole. 

They all have that hole. It’s just that the edges of it inside Lance’s chest refuse to dull. This voyage might be the thing that heals him. Keith’s not stupid enough, not tunnel-visioned enough, to deny his friend that. 

‘’No,’’ Lance shakes his head, ‘’You’re going.’’ 

* * *

Lance says to him later: ‘’Keith, if for any reason this timeline still exists after you travel back in time… Do you think you could forgive yourself for not going with Shiro?’’ In a hard-learned show of maturity that still makes Keith swallow painfully whenever it shows, Lance declares: ‘’Keith, I lost Allura. She was torn from my hands- all our hands- in a burning blaze of fire, and we tried to hold on the best we could but we _ lost. _Don’t lose Shiro to anything less than that, you hear me.’’ 

And Keith chokes out: ‘’Why do you always do this to me, man.’’ 

‘’Well, one of us has to be the emotionally mature one, you know?’’ Lance grins. ‘’I think I’ve currently got the top score, don’t you?’’ 

Keith punches him in the shoulder.

* * *

‘’Now the big question is: to _ when _do we send you?’’ Hunk chews on his pen. The meeting room of the Coalition had been repurposed for the time being, Hunk and Pidge’s labs already stuffed to the brim with the machinery needed for their journey. 

Keith shrugs. ‘’Depends. When did things start going so wrong that we couldn’t fix them anymore?’’ 

Lance puts his head in his hands. ‘’We could go on forever. The loss of the blades, the defence of Earth, Adam. Allura, of course. Isn’t that what we want to prevent the most? Allura’s death? What would stop that event, specifically?’’

Pidge grimaces. ‘’In that case, there’s little question about it: the arms race between us and Honerva. The easiest starting point to prevent Allura’s death is clear, isn’t it? We’ve got to stop Honerva from gaining power in the first place. Going back to Daibazaal to do that is so far back we could prevent our own birth, and we don’t have the power for it besides. We need something more recent.’’

Hunk hits the table. ‘’Guys, I’ve got it! The Alteans! All you have to do is go to the Altean Colony before Lotor’s reign! You don’t even have to interact with the Voltron from that time until you get back. You just have to get to the Colony while they are off fighting Zarkon, and expose the truth about Lotor to them!’’

‘’All we have to do? Don’t make it sound so easy, big guy.’’ Keith grins back at him. ‘’We’ll actually have to do it first.’’ 

‘’Plans never survive first contact with battle,’’ Shiro stands up, spreading his arms, ‘’But when have we ever let that stop us? Team Voltron is on the road again!’’ 

They all jump on him. Some feelings cannot be expressed in any other way but a group hug. 

* * *

Formulating a plan and getting to the past honestly was the easy part. Arriving in the past with little more than the clothes on their back, their bayards and each other, well. That was kind of a problem. Or it would have been, if Keith had not been an excellent vehicle thief in his younger years. 

In the stolen Galra ship, Shiro sits back and sighs happily. ‘’This brings back memories, doesn’t it?’’ 

Keith grins from behind the controls. ‘’I do hope you’re not making me bring this one back. I think its actual owners will be a bit less sedate about the incident than you were.’’ 

Shiro hums, raking a hand through his white hair. He looks comfortable, here in the purple light of the stolen ship, leaning back with a drink in his hand. Once Galran tech had meant terror, but in the face of the coalition, much has changed. Shiro still looks more relaxed than he has in the past year. Keith wonders what it means, them both being more at ease on the move in a small spacecraft, large enough to hold supplies and yet small enough to fly through the Quantum Abyss without too much notice. To say war settles onto their skin like an old friend would be a lie, but Keith cannot deny that both of them don’t do very well with being ground-bound these days. 

There is no travelling companion he’d rather have, though. No person closer to his heart. 

Keith is done with empty travelling. Done with running, all alone. He’ll run away with Shiro, as long as he can. Until his time runs out. Until Shiro walks out. 

It’s the most stressful thing these days. Living out these rose coloured hours, hearing the clock tick in the back of his mind. Asking himself: when will Shiro leave?

He wishes the answer is never, but he can’t bring himself to hope. 

* * *

The funny thing was, even though they had the coordinates of the Colony this time and would be able to travel there directly with as little danger as possible (though this _ was _the Quantum Abyss, so several monsters were to be expected), Keith was actually excited to show Shiro the Abyss. For all its dangers, it was also one of the most fantastical, wondrous places he had ever seen. He wanted to share it with him. 

They landed on the back of a titanic abyss whale, and Keith drags Shiro outside with the excitement of a child. ‘’Look! It’s incredible! They’re animals who are _ planets!’’ _

‘’Like the Balmera?’’ Shiro couldn’t help but tease, eyes twinkling as he stumbles after Keith, straight into the wilderness and wealth of life the whale possessed. 

Keith slaps him on the arm, ‘’Yes, but _ cooler, _ obviously! This is an animal we recognize! An animal that looks like one of the ones we have on earth! How mind-blowings it that they have cousins so gigantic in _ space, _ with enough life on them that they could count as a _small planetoid were they not alive?’’ _

‘’Pretty cool,’’ Shiro had to concede, freeing his wrist from Keith’s grip and taking his hand instead. Keith’s head whips up, but Shiro keeps looking staunchly ahead, a faint blush on his cheeks. 

If they’d been the same age, Keith had often asked himself, would Shiro have seen him? Seen him not only as he was, but also as someone he could love? 

His whole life Keith had watched the stars. It was only when he met Shiro that he dared to dream of them. Shiro had not given him his wings, but shown him that he had had them all along. Taught him how to spread them. Taught him how to fly. 

How… How could Keith _ not _love him after all of that? 

Holding onto his hand, holding on _ tight, _he asked himself once more if one of these days he would dare to dream after all.

* * *

There are things in this life, this universe, that you cannot predict, no matter how hard you try. Some things you simply cannot imagine until they happen before your eyes. Keith, to Shiro, was one of these things. 

Not necessarily the man he had become- no, Shiro had seen the shadows of a man who could be more, a man who could be larger than life in Keith even when he was but a boy in classroom, not daring to dream of a future in which he was actually happy. 

No, what Shiro had not expected, what Shiro could never have predicted, was what Keith would become to _ him. _

A man so beautiful the stars paled in comparison. Which was a grand thing to say, for a man who kept stumbling whenever he was on ground because he couldn’t stop staring at the stars. He was more than a little space mad. 

In love with the universe, Adam had often said when they were still together. He’d been right, and it was what had broken their relationship at last. Because Adam loved space, he did- but he could not see Shiro break himself over it. And to Shiro? His body was but a small price to pay to see the stars up close once more. 

It was an unhealthy view, to say the least, but Shiro could not help himself. He had always loved with abandon, unable to restrain himself in the matters of the heart. Why slow down when life was so short? Shiro didn’t have time for that. 

There had been a time when he’d been afraid of getting hurt, but getting hurt was part of _ life. _He could see those shadows in Keith’s eyes, that fear, that waiting. It would pass.

It would pass, because Keith loved with the same abandon Shiro did, because Keith shared the same views when it came to space. Because Shiro was just as in love with Keith as he was with the universe, and because he knew Keith would never make him choose. 

In the back of his head, Shiro hears the clock ticking down. Down to the moment Keith realizes this is forever, and that nothing but death stood in their way. 

They have wings. They’re meant to fly. 

* * *

Sneaking into the facility where Lotor is draining the Alteans of their quintessence is hard. Mainly because they really don’t want to be noticed and get Lotor’s forces down on them, few as there might be here. They manage. They manage, they record, and they fly down to the Altean Colony, exposing the truth. 

They don’t want to believe them, but a sizable part of them _ do. _Enough to rally them against the facility, after building ships to take them there. Keith smiles when he sees Romelle amongst the first to free other Alteans from their prison. Her brother, Bandor, is found within one of the draining pods, and her happiness at seeing him again is so precious that he cannot help but squirrel the memory away. It makes him happy- the shadow of her brother’s loss had always weighed her down. Now it never had to. 

Beside him, Shiro hums as he always does when content. ‘’So, onto Voltron? Saving the universe?’’ 

‘’Hmm,’’ Keith leans against his shoulder, ‘’So, this… thing that’s been happening. Not just my imagination?’’ 

Shiro looks down at him with eyes so soft that Keith just _ has _to melt into him. ‘’Keith Kogane, you’re a fool if you can’t see you’re the sun to me.’’ 

The clock in the back of Keith’s head grinds to a halt. And slowly, very slowly, a smile breaks through on his face, like the sun breaking through the clouds. 

‘’Then be my universe, forever.’’ 

And forever they have indeed. 

They’re men possessed, in love with the universe, always looking at the stars, but their hands remain firmly entangled. Forever, until death do them apart.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to farfetched for betaing this fic!
> 
> After freeing the Colony from Lotor, Keith and Shiro head for balmeras to collect crystals to power Earth's tech once the time is there.


End file.
